MANAGING THE NEWS

...For the first 29 minutes, Klein lived up to his reputation, giving us the impression that Nixon knew what he was doing in Vietnam and at home...

...According to the Dean of the Richard Milhous Nixon School of Journalism, Ted Agnew, anyone who sees the news in a different light than he does is guilty of it...

...After all, we elected Nixon, despite the things these so-called experts said about him...

...The diversity of approaches is what we know today as a free tv press...

...Why was he nominated...

...although he is probably the best Director of Communications the country has ever had...

...It all adds up to something like two ballet dancers executing a pas de deux...

...I first became aware of this during Nikita Khrushchev's last official visit to the United States in the early 1960s...

...You can never be sure about Vice President Agnew, but Klein has the reputation of always speaking for the President...

...Why do you expect to win...

...What was so extraordinarily striking about Herb Klein, therefore, was that he actually tried to answer Pierpoint...

...Possibly a reputation for asking good questions...

...In any case, the gist of the ex-newspaper executive from San Diego's remarks was that Judge Haynsworth was surely going to win in the Senate on November 21...

...The President objectively recognizes the reporters he intuitively senses won't embarrass him...

...Khrushchev was very much like Nixon, in the sense that he also loved to appear on television...

...With the stakes so small, I found myself wondering what made Pier-point suddenly think of that last question at the final moments of the televised press conference...

...Frankly, I think the fears about the impact of the Distortionists are exaggerated...

...He may be the only man in the Administration who has not had an independent thought since Inauguration Day...

...why any member of the present Administration would want to start tinkering with a mass communications system that has produced both a Presidential press conference and a Face the Nation in one century is something of a mystery...

...Still, I would like to say a few words about them anyway, if only to refresh my own memory...

...This was probing, hard-hitting tv journalism at its best...

...As a matter of fact, he is a surprisingly slow speaker and slurs his words, which makes it hard to quote him with accuracy...

...He should have appealed instead to our patriotic emotions...

...On tv panel news shows, the reporters often seem most interested in displaying their knowledge of current events...

...It certainly was a relief to be able at long last to stop worrying about the war...

...Whether his speech pattern is native to Southern California or something acquired from the Southerners who have been moving in and out of the White House these days like migratory workers, I don't know...

...It ranks with Secretary of the Treasury David Kennedy assuring the tv audience that the prime interest rate would not rise, and Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird warning us that the Red Chinese missiles are coming...

...This is in marked contrast to free-wheeling press conferences like Face the Nation, where potentially embarrassing questions are saved for the last 38 seconds...

...In the remaining time, we'd like to get into the Judge Haynsworth nomination...

...Why is the Administration going on with the fight...

...Its outstanding achievements in this area, I think, are the Presidential press conferences...

...The East Wing of the White House is usually crowded with journalists, many of whom have dazzling queries on their pads...

...The State Department should form a creditor's committee to help pay off the hotel bills Madame Nhu incurred during her last visit to America, so she can return to these shores and tell the Administration's side of the story...

...As I recall, Nixon's formula for keeping the country partiy informed has something to do with format...

...I would recommend Madame Nhu...

...His mistake was trying to explain intellectually what we are doing in Vietnam, and how we are going to get out...

...The moment called for a Clarence Darrow...

...Every time the avowed Communist went before the cameras, he was followed by a group of experts who warned the American people the man was a known Communist mouthing the Party line...

...Naturally, it would have to be a strong personality, someone with a reputation for objectivity who could speak with the authority of a Chet Huntley, a David Brinkley or a Walter Cronkite-preferably a mother...

...On Television MANAGING THE NEWS BY MARVIN KITMAN The most dramatic demonstration of the way television works as an information medium that I have witnessed recently occurred last November 16 on Face the Nation (cbs...

...As for the guests in these battles of wits, they are primarily interested in not saying anything, no matter how brilliant they are...

...I won't go into what the Administration must think about a Harry Reasoner...

...The Distortionists, it is apparently felt, tend to run amuck immediately after the networks give the President free time to deliver a message...

...We have less than a minute left," White House correspondent Robert Pierpoint told Herbert G. Klein, the Nixon Administration's Director of Communications...

...But I saw Nixon's Vietnam speech on November 3, and I think he contributed to all the distortion that followed...

...What would happen if the President's man was cut off the air before the White House position had been fully stated...

...I glanced at my watch...

...But taking the question out of context makes Pierpoint sound like the hanging judge on the 30-min-ute-long Face the Nation tribunal, and I honestly don't think he was out to make the President look bad...

...Of course, the Russian had no sense of dignity, and even appeared on the David Susskind show...

...Klein, however is no Darrow...

...If a meaningful answer comes out of a long dissertation, well that's a bonus-but the really important thing is to show that you are up on the news...

...It was a case of the nearsighted leading the blind-although I have to admit my standards for objective analysis are not so high as the White House's...

...They're out to get me is why," President Nixon probably thought in his television den back at the White House...

...By talking out of both sides of his mouth very fast, that great defender of the underdog might have done justice to the subject...

...My guess is that they would be pleased just to have somebody represent their point of view on the panels...

...Unfortunately for the President, too, nothing mobilizes the network news departments faster than the opportunity to explain the obvious...

...Nevertheless I caught my breath as Klein started to explain the Haynsworth business...

...By the time Pierpoint finished piggybacking little questions on to the big one, there were only 38 seconds remaining...

...If he really wanted to embarrass the Administration, he would have made his last question the program's first...

...Indeed, one of the thrills of an average Sunday early afternoon ¦-the time period reserved for newsmen and public figures to get together on the networks for discussions as relaxed as any you, will hear at the National Press Club bar-Is watching how skillfully the various performers completely ignore each other...

...Not even in television-a medium which has a widely deserved reputation for shallowness-could any newsman expect a responsible White House spokesman to seriously tackle in less than a minute a question that goes to the very root of the Judiciary...

...The secret of their success is perhaps too well known to go into...

...Now this is nothing if not another example of the kind of false information Ted Agnew said the American people were getting out of television these days...

...As far as I have been able to determine, the basic issue is "distortion...

...The vote for the controversal conflict-of-interest seat on the Supreme Court was only five days away...

...By this standard, there are times when even a Walter Cronkite is a notorious offender...

...What did Pierpoint possibly expect to get out of all this...

...The newspapers elected President Dewey in 1948, but I don't think any medium can match television's dissemination of false information and misinterpretation...

...What the Administration really wants in the way of analysis after a Presidential message, one cynic has suggested, is for all the tv sets in the nation to be turned on, with nothing coming out except a test pattern saying "vote republican...

...cbs News would have to account for the behavior, and let the Administration know just how long it had been an Enemy of the State...

...It is a tragedy that at a time like this, when we need a victim of Communist aggression in Vietnam on television, she is forced to live in exile in Paris...

...This is absurd...

...It hardly mattered that everybody knew the Administration was fighting so hard on Haynsworth because the President had put his prestige on the line...